Overclockers UK Infin8 Nebula Gaming PC Review

It's probably every PC enthusiast's dream to head online with three grand to spend on hardware. The mountain of gear arriving, no doubt including water-cooling equipment galore, a premium case and pretty much the fastest components money can buy would no doubt send most of us giddy with joy. As such, we can only imagine the glee of whoever built Overclockers UK's Infin8 Nebula.

We would of course relish putting a system like this together, water-cooling and all, even if you can probably kiss goodbye to a weekend once you factor in leak testing. That's where pre-built systems like this come in though. If you don't have the time or the experience to be confident enough in running conductive coolant through £3K's worth of hardware or simply want a stunning PC to arrive at your door and be gaming on your 4K monitor half an hour later - a pre-built system is absolutely worth considering.

Overclockers is one of the few UK etailers to offer custom water-cooled PCs too - we're not talking about your average all-in-one liquid cooler here. We're talking about a custom kit with indivudual components. The Nebula is part of its Infin8 range - not quite the hyper car-esque
8 Pack range but instead a super car-like group of PCs that have been 'inspired by 8 Pack'. That's not to sell the Nebula short, though, as it's one mega PC.

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If you're up to date with current hardware then you'll see a lot of familiar things here. Overclockers UK has used Phanteks' Enthoo Mini XL. We'll have an in-depth review of this very chassis early next week, but for now we can safely say that there's not too much that's mini about it - this is a fairly large case but Phanteks has limited it to micro-ATX motherboards. As a result, there's a fairly enormous amount of headroom for water-cooling, which Overclockers UK has capitalised on.

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Firstly the core hardware - you might be surprised that this isn't a 6-core CPU based system, i.e. X99-based. However, it's worth remembering that the Core i7-4790K, which has also been overclocked to a lofty 4.6GHz, still sports eight threads via four physical and four logical cores thanks to hyper-threading. That, and the fact it retails for close to 10 percent of the system's total cost and the decision starts to make sense.

However, the main reason is that this is first and foremost a gaming PC, and for that reason, Overclockers UK has also seen fit to include not one, but two Nvidia GTX 980s. Now, these will be limited to an x8/x8 PCI-E lane configuration, whereas opting for a 40 PCI-E lane CPU and an X99 system would allow for the maximum x16/x16 mode. However, most of the testing we've seen shows the benefits, to two-way setups at least, are insignificant.

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Memory wise, Overclockers UK is spot on with a 16GB dual-channel 2,400MHz set of modules, while for storage, there's a single 250GB Samsung SSD 850 EVO - perhaps a little disappointing at this price, although it is backed up by a 3TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk. However, if you need more SSD space or don't need quite as huge a hard disk, then Overclockers UK's configurator allows you to fine-tune the specification.

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This includes dropping a GTX 980 from the system - for instance if you'll only be gaming at 2,560 x 1,440 or below, and likewise, the Windows 8.1-based system we received can also be shipped with Windows 7, while our optical drive-less PC can also come equipped with a DVD rewriter or Blu-ray drive.